Pick and Write [Agricultural Word]👉#09

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A gardener that I happen to have been raised close to and is someone who has been working on the exact same piece of land for over 30 years. He grows mostly tomatoes, but some peppers alongside a few other things that I don't think I've yet learned the names of. The way I know he gets up before the sun is because I was at a naming ceremony in 2019 and went to visit this gardener at around 5 AM, we had to get early because the ceremony was set to commence at 7:30 AM and by we I mean myself and my parents. When I arrived there, he was bent over, working on his garden. I was shocked, that early in the morning.

To me, I think horticulture deserves more credit for what it does. Most people see growing food as something to do on weekends but these growers are bending nature over and with skill enough not to ruin things and are growing food and beauty out of the dirt using their knowledge and some of them just their hands. If that is not true mastery, I don't know what is.

We celebrate architects, we celebrate painters. But not that many recognize or ever stands in line to pay tribute to the person who grafted a drought resistant variety of fruit onto a rootstock that would otherwise die in the heat of Accra. But that person provides food for so many families. Their work is both functionally and in a way, beautiful like many gallery pieces.

Planting things is actually an art form that most people don't consider to be part of culture. It is very essential but most at times unrecognized, and it's producing year after year.

This is my first pick and write contest entry and I picked horticulture. My main objective was not to define or explain it but to let people understand the true value of it.